Hollywood Spectator (1937-39)

Hollywood Spectator Page Five Some Late ^Previews Metro’s They Gave Him a Gun, a picture which will fail to give audiences much satisfaction, as it is made from an illogical, psychologically unsound story and is inappropriately cast, was previewed one day too late to enable a review of it to appear in this Spectator. It will be among the reviews in the next issue. Truly Great Accomplishment MAKE WAY FOR TOMORROW, Paramount. Producer-Director, Leo McCarey; novel, Josephine Lawrence; play, Helen and Nolan Leary; screen play, Vina Delmar; photographer, William C. Mellor; special effects, Gordon Jennings; music, George Antheil; musical director, Boris Morros; film editor, LeRoy Stone; assistant director, Harry Scott. Cast: Victor Moore, Beulah Bondi, Fay Bainter, Thomas Mitchell, Porter Hall, Barbara Read, Maurice Moscovitch, Elizabeth Risdon, Minna Gombell, Ray Mayer, Ralph Remley, Louise Beavers, Louis Jean Heydt, Gene Morgan. Running time, 90 minutes. BEAUTIFUL picture, one of those rare ones which memory puts on its list of those impossible to forget. See it now, and ten, twenty years hence you will be telling the children about it, or will be living it over again with those who see it with you. That is the kind of picture Make Way for Tomorrow is, fit to take its place among the best of all the silents and in its way the best of all the talkies. It is a little picture, its story about wholly unimportant people who merely live in front of us some incidents in their uneventful, commonplace lives; a picture which has no dramatic moments, no brilliant dialogue passages, no great stars, only one visually impressive sequence; but during its placid progress from fade-in to fade-out, it plays softly a symphony on your emotions, goes into your heart and leaves you, when you leave it, with a lump in your throat and tears in your eyes. Make Way for Tomorrow is an emotional assault which will become a part of screen history. Leo McCarey is more than just the producer and director of the picture. He is its creator ; it is his emotional response to the story’s appeal which has been photographed, the beats of his sympathetic heart which set its tempo. In the past identified principally with fast moving comedies, he was responsible for laughter and gay moments in film theatres and gave no hint of the heights he could reach with strongly human story material. So deeply was he impressed with the possibilities of Josephine Lawrence’s novel that he lived with it a full year without salary, steadily building a picture of it in his mind. He had Vina Delmar put it into a script as he saw it, selected the people for the various parts, imbued them with his own enthusiasm, and during shooting lived with them in a little world his and their emotions had created and which only the camera invaded to bring to our outer world what it saw inside. Outstanding among the many fine things the screen reveals as the film unwinds, is its lack of direct bid for our emotional response. It is a romantic tragedy, its romance culminating in marriage fifty years before the story opens, its principals, as we see them, two dear old people who have five sons and daughters, all comfortably situated, but too occupied with their own affairs to provide a joint home for their parents when the old home in which the children were raised was taken over by the bank. The last scene shows the old father taking a train for California to live with a daughter, the old wife bound for a home for aged women as soon as the train departs. For half a century they had lived together; for the short rest of their lives a heartless, unheeding continent would separate them. That is all the story there is. But at no spot in its telling is there a maudlin moment, no obvious effort to gain our sympathy, no invitation to the tears which come unbidden to eyes in the audience. Even the two victims of the tragedy of unfilial thoughtlessness enter no complaints, weep no tears, ask for no sympathy. They feel deeply, it is true; and we feel with them. If the children could see through the masks the parents wear, as the camera sees through them, the story would not have reached its closing scene, one in which the dry-eyed old people exchange a gentle farewell kiss while each tries to deceive the other with the simulated sincerity of their assurances that soon they will be together again — one of the most poignant moments in the annals of screen entertainment. T I HE picture is a psychologically sound example of screen craftsmanship. The measure of the emotional response a film creation earns marks the degree in which it has achieved its purpose as entertainment. It is not its mission to photograph emotion for us to ape ; its mission is to make suggestions which our imagination weaves into facts which appeal to our sympathy and induce our emotional reaction. This picture, therefore, with its lack of direct appeal to our sympathy, is constructed along authentic cinematic lines. It has that precious quality of apparently being indifferent to the existence of an audience. McCarey ’s direction throughout is particularly notable for its freedom from audience influence, for its lack of resort to timeworn devices to emphasize a story point, to cause a laugh or coax a tear. He takes us into the homes of members of one family and permits us to acquaint ourselves with what is happening in them. He puts no value on the happenings, does not present them as being anything out of the ordinary, merely allows us to witness them and make of them what we will. The emotional appeal of the picture is cumulative. Let us take one incident, a trivial thing in itself but made powerfully appealing by the careful building of all which goes before. The old people, on their last evening together and while awaiting the time of the train’s departure, visit the now fashionable hotel at which they spent their honeymoon half a century before. In the restaurant the orchestra is playing a waltz, and they decide to dance. As they reach the floor, the music turns into fast modern tempo which completely bewilders the romantic couple. The orchestra leader notices them among the many dancers, stops the fast music and starts the dreamy old waltz, “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” The old man smiles his thanks, the leader smiles, and the dance goes on.